Dyyno: Drag-and-Drop P2P Video Streaming

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Dyyno: Drag-and-Drop P2P Video Streaming

It's hard to imagine a simpler way to stream video from your computer to the web than Dyyno, whose creators hope to disrupt the video market with their dirt-simple peer-to-peer video streaming service. Once the Windows application is running, dragging the "d" icon (screenshot to the right) onto any active window starts streaming that window through a Flash player at static Dyyno URL (for example, I can use it to share any window on my Windows computer at mychannel.dyyno.com/wired).

Their technology, announced Tuesday, lets you show anyone in the world virtually anything on your computer, from your camcorder preview window (for live webcasting) to videos already stored on your hard drive, to videogames, presentations, line drawings, documents, and so on. Drag the "d" to whatever you want people to see, and they can go to the corresponding URL to view it. Broadcasters have the ability to record what they're broadcasting to local disk, offering video podcasters, tutorial teachers, corporate human resources departments, and anyone else who could benefit from showing remote people something on a computer screen a way to build up a potentially valuable Video-on-Demand (VOD) catalog.

You can try the service for a month for free, but Dyyno charges $10/month after that for up to ten concurrent viewers, and the prices go up from there for businesses. Still, Dynno claims that its unique architecture, which leverages P2P, allows them to charge about ten times less than competing firms. Webex sees the value in it; the online meeting company plans to integrate Dyyno's technology soon, although you can also use it on its own.

There are countless ways for businesses to apply the one-two punch of live P2P and archived video streams for public and private purposes. Xfire uses Dyyno's system to allow its gaming community to watch each other play World of Warcraft live, for instance, as well as serving up a VOD archive so players can witness legendary gaming moments with their own eyes. Xfire's live implementation of Dyyno is particularly compelling, if you're the type — at times, hundreds of gamers use it to chat as they watch someone else play WoW, critiquing their every move. You can even what's going on in the gamer's room as they play, if they have their microphone activated.

Dynno president and CEO Raj Jaswa told wired.com that the slim technology behind Dyyno allows gamers to play games (or live video personalities to film themselves) without overly taxing computing resources and slowing down the game or causing frames to drop from the video, and that is uses an adaptive version of the H.264 (video) and AAC (audio) codecs to rejigger the bit rate based on the viewer's download speed.

Two years ago, a team of researchers from Stanford Labs decided to build a brand new video platform from scratch, using what they'd learned in over five years of research. They based their thinking on a few key facts: that the client-server model (YouTube) is already working well, although the cost of video distribution is still very high compared to that of text; and that large-scale, one-to-many streaming requires multiple web servers, while P2P scales better than centralized networks when it comes to distributing video.

"The solution they came up with was to marry both of the architectures – peer-to-peer video distribution, which provided the scalability and cost structure with the control and reliability of client/server by basically back-filling from a central hub whatever data packets, for some reason or another, couldn't get through," explained Jaswa.

Gaming is one of the more challenging applications for Dyyno; its creators also envision businesses using to offer private presentations incorporating live audio, video, and any file on their computers. But the fact that Dyyno can incorporate advertising, pay-per-view, and paid content subscriptions makes it also useful for people who want to offer niche tutorials online – "how to fix a muffler" or "get a soufflé to rise," and so on, with a low monthly overhead.